Thursday, September 20, 2007

This Summer, the consistently impressive (and influential to me) Attacknine Records started a project called The 13 Weeks Of Summer, where the aim was to release new ambient music in the form of "singles" by various artists that you could download for only 99 cents each. SSR was lucky enough to be asked several times to contribute to 13 Weeks, and since the series has just now finished, I thought I'd post some information about all the tracks we gave to them.

Milieu - Glossy Ceramic Harmonies

This track was recorded during the Eight Thousander sessions, but was left off of the record for being too long (9 minutes), as well as being more effected in post, as opposed to being completely live and improvised like the rest of the album. It's very pretty, guitar based, and would appeal to fans of Eight Thousander or Of The Apple.

VCV - Barefoot Blues

This was actually a Teenager song, originally, and Teenager-recorded versions of it exist and will probably be released on later tapes. This version was laid down in a more freeform, loose way, with an electric guitar in the garage one hot day. Ending up much longer than any Teenager track would ever be, I wasn't sure what to do with it, so I called David up and we decided that he should play some slide guitar over it and we could just make it a VCV track. So here it is...very reminiscent of our cover of Jandek's "I'm Ready", which was also recorded around the same time. Pretty and sad.

David Tagg - Nautical Dusk

David recorded this live on electric guitar and two reel-to-reels, set up in a similar fashion as Robert Fripp's "Frippertronics". There's actually a full album of material from this session, which has yet to be titled and will most likely see a release at SSR. I mastered it for him, and it turned out quite beautifully. Another example of David's wonderful way with a guitar.

VCV - Live Drone Three

This was an impromptu jam David and I played the day he arrived here with Melissa on their vacation in May. David holds down the guitar and I played bass, and there's actually a subtle beat carried on my organ's drums. Quite shoegazey, and 13 minutes long to boot. Because of the drums, we never would've included this on a VCV album, but it luckily found a proper home at Attacknine!

Brian Grainger - Tortoiseshell (Live 09-24-2006)

As the title indicates, this was recorded live in late 2006 on electric guitar and chimes. Clocking in at around half an hour, this sat around in the Brian vault for a long time before a good opportunity for it to be released finally came along.

In addition to our contributions, there's also a ton of great material there by The Surf The Sundried, The White Lodge, Manual, William Fowler Collins and others! Go check it out!

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

I just finished recording this album last night, and I thought I'd mention it here. It began with me recording material for Sun-Day, which sometimes yields more "noisier" rather than "ambient" results. Since I'm usually just as fond of the not-so-calm parts of these sessions, I wanted a place to put them, and so I hatched the idea to piece little albums out of them, if I could assemble the tracks cohesively enough. So I guess what the result became could be called "noisy Sun-Day outtakes", however since it's conception, this idea has blossomed into much more than that.

Built from these bits and pieces from the Sun-Day sessions, this is the first of three records of it's kind. Everything is live, basically me improvising with my own source material through several layers of amp /pedal distortion and various analog delays. The results are similar to my work on the tape split with Ophibre. The tracklisting is as follows:

Sunday, September 16, 2007

My newest contribution to our ongoing 3" CD-R series at SSR is One Four Nine. Here's what SSR said:

Written and performed entirely on solo electric bass, One Four Nine is a deep watery drone meditation that thickens as you progress further into it. Fattened harmonies slowly emerge from blurry chords and once again you're lulled out of reality for 21 minutes.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

That's right! Just what EVERYONE has been biting their nails for: a new Pink Space EP! (internets sarcasms)

Designed by the Dark Pink Lord to hold everyone over until the next full-length is complete. Despite what your dirty mind would no doubt imagine when you read the album title, this EP is all about cats, having their idea of a "DJ party" one frisky Caturday. So, have some cake, get your noisemakers out, and HAS A PARTAY.

While we're on the topic of compilation appearances, I don't think I got the chance to talk about this one before.

This past Summer, I contributed a track called White Smoke to a compilation called Summerlights #2 over at the longstanding EKO netlabel. It's quite a long compilation, and there's alot of beautiful ambient material throughout, so go check it out. Notables include Sonmi451, The Green Kingdom and Kenneth Kirschner.

There is a new Vhom track, Skvph Vx2, that is part of a very nice compilation of noise/ambient/industrial material at Weird And Wired, titled Fuzzy Green. This track would appeal to folks who liked my Nine Acid split with Skonflap (Wisp), as it's a total headfuck of overdistorted percussion and corrosive acid-synth lines. Other notables on the compilation are Dino Felipe, Lackluster, Bazaar and Yoursck. Check it out for free here:

The first cassette-only release at SSR is now out! Housed in David Tagg's distinct and unique printed canvas, with high-quality decals on the tape itself. Looks and feels quite lovely!

Here is what SSR had to say about the music:

Half an hour of lo-fi instrumental folk and blues guitar songs that Brian recorded as far back as 1997. All of it has been harvested from hours and hours of recordings in various states of wear, most of it on old tapes with little more than a year or a location written on the labels. The sound of Teenager largely reflects the bare-bones acoustic songwriting that has always been at the heart of all of Brian's music, yet nothing this raw and primitive has ever been released until now. The playing is untrained, but melodic and endearing in a very homemade way. Recommended listening for the onset of Autumn and slow aimless driving through the country. This is intimate music that has been steeped in the southern landscape and reaches deep from the fading histories of a poor southern boy.

These are $6.00 each, plus shipping and handling, and you can pick yours up here:

Last year around Winter, my friend Fieldtriqp and I were discussing the possibilities of an experiment. I've always loved his music, specifically his melodies, and we thought it would be an interesting project if I built an ambient record out of sampling his beatless melodic moments in Fieldtriqp songs. Files were transferred, and a good bit of the unreleased Fieldtriqp catalog was mined strictly with this album in mind. What resulted became The Fieldtriqp Reconstructions, an atmospheric take on my own and Fieldtriqp's music. Very desolate and pretty at times, despite being mostly blurred out, unintelligible drones and massive, glacial chord changes.

As usual, I made a handful of these on hand-decorated CD-Rs, each only $5.00 in my shop. For MP3 clips and order information, click here:

This is a record I did earlier this Spring, during an evening thunderstorm. With the window to my bedroom open, I set up two microphones, one as a room mic and the other in the open window, recording the storm. Both microphones were then run through double delay effects and some compression, and while the storm poured on outside, the sounds of my wooden and metal chimes on the porch played along with my improvising on various instruments inside the room. The result is Photoplay Music, a textural, lonesome listening experience that's perfect for putting in your stereo while reading a book or napping this Fall. Also great in headphones, as the double delays move around quite a bit.

I've put together a pile of them on hand-decorated CD-Rs, available only through my Milieu shop for $5.00! To listen to MP3 clips and order one, go here:

Yesterday, I was just lazing around the net like I usually do and I happened across some very nice words about my New Drugs album on a music forum somewhere. Seems like this is the first time someone who wrote about my work actually cross-referenced previous works and knew what they were talking about. Here is what they said:

As the age-old adage goes, there are some things you can count on in life, such as death and taxes. Well it looks like we can now add "a monthly new release from Milieu (Brian Grainger)" to that list. Following his Of The Apple and a handful of CD-R's from earlier this year, Grainger now gives us New Drugs For Nuclear Families Of The Seventies. For the most part, the Milieu catalog is divided into two camps: fuzzy, washy drone (Beyond The Sea Lies The Stars) and beat-driven ambient (In Hills Made Of Clouds). While Of The Apple could be seen as a true predecessor to Beyond, New Drugs clearly follows in the footsteps of the more upbeat Clouds. This is, as Grainger calls it, beat-based psychedelia. While I happen to prefer drone Milieu to IDM Milieu, there is no denying the beauty of Grainger's work. Although the word "organic" gets thrown around a lot in the post-BoC world of IDM, here the descriptor actually fits. In fact, it is this over-arching organic feel that permeates throughout every Milieu release, regardless of which camp it fits into. Any concerns of Grainger spreading himself too thin are quashed about 30 seconds into "Summer Honey". Thankfully, over-saturation does not apply to music this therapeutic.

Unfortunately, even though I registered with the forum to contact this person and say "Hey, thanks", they won't permit me to post a reply or PM anyone. So, if you wrote this, please get in touch!

This will be where I announce news and updates on all things Brian Grainger from now on. As I'm sure most of you probably noticed, the Milieu site tends to sit in disrepair for long periods of time, devoid of any updates, and that's simply because I'm usually too busy to sit down and get tangled up in HTML just so the site remains current. Blogs are easier, and this one looks just clean-cut and effective enough to serve my purposes.

About Me

I make a lot of music, I help run a couple great record labels, I'm happily married, I'm better at school than I used to be, I'm half English and half Italian, I really love food, I'm named after my father's favorite Rolling Stones.